Donna Cartwright

Donna Cartwright, born in 1947, served as a highly respected copy editor for The New York Times for three decades, and was a member and officer of The Newspaper Guild before retiring from the Times in 2006. She also has been a longtime transgender, LGBT and labor activist. She has served as co-president of Pride at Work, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender constituency group of the labor movement, and as a member of the Executive Board of the Maryland State and D.C. A.F.L.-C.I.O. She was a co-founder of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, the Gender Rights Advocacy Association of New Jersey, the National Center for Transgender Equality and TransEpiscopal, the association of transgender Episcopalians, and Gender Rights Maryland. Cartwright is believed to be the first Times staffer to publicly disclose her status as a transgender person when interviewed in 1998 by Barbara Walters on ABC television to discuss her decision to resolve her gender conflict and to transition as a woman. Claiming and affirming her confident identity, Cartwright has been a powerful role model for journalists as well as a powerful force for fairness and change in the workplace.